I'll get to the cash, get told "sorry, no visa", and take out my debit card to pay that way instead. Really not a big deal.
It's just Walmart annoying their customers to try to prove some point to Visa.
My British debit cards use either the Visa or Mastercard network.
My Danish one does too, though it also uses the local Dankort network if available.
A few years ago the pinguins took over (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x48eLs8tnJo) and basically every card in the UK is now either Visa/MasterCard/Amex and very few Maestro.
The latter is more widely accepted for online shopping (only some merchants accept Maestro, whereas everyone accepts Visa and Visa Debit usually works there), so I was happy.
The merchant can also disable you from selecting 'credit' while paying to force it to use the debit network.
Its also like this in Australia.
Very few banks still issue debit only cards (Switch/Maestro), they do if you ask for them, but they mostly only work at the ATM.
This never happens in the UK. It confuses the heck out of me in countries where it does (e.g. New Zealand).
I don't think any UK banks have their own payment network. The cards you get to access the account directly are debit cards (usually Visa Debit or Maestro), some (i.e. children accounts) give you a 'cash card' which only works at that bank's ATMs.
Same thing in Singapore. Never need to select credit in NZ / Aus / SG. Unless you specifically want to use credit.
1. CREDITO
2. DEBITO
where you choose if you want to pay with credit or debit.
Last year I went to the UK on vacation. While paying my bills I noticed most people wouldn't know what to do when prompted. They would look confused and just hand me the card machine and let me handle it.
In the past a lot of cards were Switch, which became Maestro and then everyone dumped it for Visa.
Fortunately we still have the Link system where you're not charged for using an ATM that doesn't belong to your bank. cough Canada cough.
Canadian banking is different from everywhere because the market is protected from foreign competition. It makes Canadian bank stocks good to own, but makes banking expensive and annoying for Canadians.
I hate the banks as much as any red blooded Canadian but it's important to remember that our system is the envy of many other countries.
It's with good reason that the former Bank of Canada governor (Mark Carney) was recruited to head up the Bank of England and also serves as the chairman of the G20's Financial Stability Board.
Somebody steals your credit card and goes on a spree? Call your bank, dispute the charges, and life goes on.
Somebody steals your debit card? Good luck, money is gone from your bank account, and BTW, your mortgage and auto payments just bounced, so we're going to tack on some overdraft fees too. Have a nice day.
I had $4000 stolen from my bank account via a compromised debit card. The charges were reversed the same day. The bank is still liable for fraudulent transactions if you didn't authorize them.
With credit it's he bank. Fine show my account balance 4k high, I refuse to pay my bill.
Same thing with debit and it's my cash missing, and I need to go through a dance to get my own cash back.
In fact just had a CC stolen last week. No harm to me because I wasn't holding the burden.
I refuse to use my debit card for anything but at an ATM.
They also had this insecure-dy-default behavior allowing checking account overdraws to start pulling out of savings. It's worth checking that setting, too.
As a family, we set up an extra account at Schwab to write checks and do automatic payments against. There wasn't any additional cost to us - having some money sitting in the account is hardly worth worrying about with what Schwab (or anyone else) pays in interest.
The big benefit to me is that the account doesn't have over-draft protections. I have to manually move money into the account from a different account where paychecks, etc. go into. That account can't write checks, etc.
If our account is compromised, well, we lose (temporarily, I hope) what's in there but not the cash that accumulates to pay for property taxes, etc.
Overdraw protection is tricky. For example Ally offers it for free for me. If I really did accidentally overdraw my checking, I would want it sucked from my savings. However if someone stole my Ally debit, I would not want both my checking AND savings drained...
So worst case you are without a small amount of money during any dispute/fraud resolution period, but your major regular ACH payments are not at risk.
The downside is having to monitor your balances closely and transfer funds more often (which can sometimes involve a fee but if you shop around you can find banks that don't change a fee for inter-account transfers).
Works well.
The one time a charge went through my bank reversed it that day.
People can do what they want, but I'm personally very uneasy about directly exposing my bank accounts, so I use credit cards as a buffer. Moreover, I don't have a lot of faith in banks not engaging in shenanigans that I've seen them do to me before, like transaction reordering, double charging debit transactions, debiting charges immediately, while sitting on deposits for up to a week, etc.
I think ACH is probably worse than debit cards.
We had some sort of discussion here a few days ago (I forget exact topic, maybe Swift?). Someone linked to why Donald Knuth no longer sends checks to people: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html
It's an old rant, but if anything, things have gotten worse.
We desperately need some sort of cryptographically secure means of moving money. But it can't have all the baggage of Bitcoin.
a) File a police report b) Do an (offline)report and document every transaction I considered to be fraudulent c) Sent these reports to the bank, where they would go thru it (some sort of committee) and if accepted I would be refunded.
Quite-a-hassle, took several hours to do those reports...
(This is Danish/Finnish bank, Danske Bank. I'm no longer their customer)
In Canada the account holder is not liable for fraudulent transactions, whether it is credit or debit... a benefit of our highly regulated banks.
I wonder if that means my TD Bank Visa brand debit card won't work or if it's only Visa credit cards?
What? It's very, very clear that this is about fees.
The relevance of the parent you responded to is that a Canadian shop not accepting Visa (or Mastercard) is only a very mild inconvenience because there are other widely used payment networks.
in Canada (actually, pretty much everywhere but America)
since the systems sound pretty identical.
Obviously Discover, Amex and Diner's Club exist, but they are barely worth mentioning. Hardly anyone (proportionally) carries those cards, and only a few merchants accept them.
In the United States, for a merchant to refuse Visa would be suicidal. In Canada, it's almost a non-issue because all the debit cards are processed on another, non-Visa network.
What of the above do you disagree with?
My bank card now is both an Interac card and a Visa Debit card. But the Visa Debit part work anywhere except online US retailers.